Name: Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America
Start: 2026-04-11T14:00:00-06:00
End: 2026-04-11T15:00:00-06:00
Location: 215 S. Tejon Street, 80903

Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America

Presented by Historian Rachel S. Gross
ABOUT THE PROGRAM
A fascinating history of the profitable paradox of the American outdoor experience: visiting nature first requires shopping.
No escape to nature is complete without a trip to an outdoor recreational store or a browse through online offerings. This is the irony of the American outdoor experience: visiting wild spaces supposedly untouched by capitalism first requires shopping. With consumers spending billions of dollars on clothing and equipment each year as they seek out nature, the American outdoor sector grew over the past 150 years from a small collection of outfitters to an industry contributing more than 2 percent of the nation’s economic output.
Rachel S. Gross argues that this success was predicated not just on creating functional equipment but also on selling an authentic, anticommercial outdoor identity. In other words, shopping for the woods was also about being—or becoming—the right kind of person. Demonstrating that outdoor culture is commercial culture, Gross examines Americans’ journey toward outdoor expertise by tracing the development of the nascent outdoor goods industry, the influence of World War II on its growth, and the boom years of outdoor businesses.
ABOUT THE PRESENTER
Rachel S. Gross is a historian of the modern United States. She is the author of Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America (Yale University Press, 2024) and co-editor of Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America’s Biggest Retail Stores (University of Wyoming Press, 2024). She is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Denver where she teaches U.S. gender, business, and public history. The NEH and the Mellon Foundation have supported her projects on the history of displacement and community resistance on the Auraria campus in Denver. Her collaborative work includes walking tours, digital history projects, and museum exhibits.